Acrylic Pour Art

Hey all, I decided to try something new that I’d seen a lot of videos for: Acrylic Pour Art. I started this process by looking up a written tutorial, and came across this one. I found it to be very clear and straightforward, and I took pictures as I followed!

I got these supplies from my local art supply store & the dollar store. Included was a drop sheet, Popsicle sticks, plastic cups (in 2 sizes), a squirt bottle (from the dollar store), and a painting spatula, canvas, pouring medium, school glue, and paints (from the art supply store). Pictured is also our scale, but I found I didn’t need it (especially since different liquids would weigh different amounts.

I placed the canvas on dixie cups so it won’t stick to the drop sheet when it dries, as suggested in the tutorial.

Prepping the coloured (and white) paint.

I started by pouring some water in a plastic cup, and I eye-balled about the same amount of glue to the same cup and mixed it. Then I took out tiny dixie cups and poured a bit of paint and way too much water-glue mixture to make the paints a proper melted ice cream texture. So I had to add more paint. I mixed, and filled the rest of the cup with medium (in the future, I would pour the water-glue mixture slower so there’s more space for medium – It scared me a bit reading the instructions on the medium container which indicated I wasn’t using nearly enough. But I wanted to teat the tutorial properly and it seems to have worked fine [it’s not fully dry yet]).

I next mixed a base coat, which was supposed to be more runny than the coloured paint. I mixed 500 ml of water-glue, white paint, and pouring medium each. Next I needed to prepare the canvas!

I poured a lot of base coat on the canvas, but it was about the right amount, and I used the pallet knife to smooth it over the whole thing.

I made a mistake when pouring each colour into the solo cup for the canvas. I didn’t add enough white paint. Instead of doing white-colour-white-colour-white-colour-white-colour-white… I did white-colour-colour-colour-white-colour-white (you can tell when I realized my mistake). I was quite concerned this would completely ruin the final product. But I figured, first time is never going to be without mistakes.

I started pouring. I tried very hard to pour down a line with tight circles, but the circles weren’t so tight, and when I got to the bottom, I didn’t want to “waste” my leftover paint (mistake #2!!) and so I circled the line with another line of little circles. It was a mess, but I used all the paint! Now was the time for the final step…. tilting the canvas… well, time to see the final (undried) result, I guess.

I literally couldn’t be happier with the results!! I was so excited that I even grabbed some plain white bookmarks that I leave around for making christmas bookmarks and dipped them in the swirls that slided off the canvas…